Re: Column view update & issues & tabs

[Francesco Fumanti <francesco fumanti gmx net>]

Hello,


> The fact that firefox has tabs doesn't really translate directly to
> nautilus though. Web browsing is quite a different thing than browsing
> some local files. The tabs in a browser are much more likely to be
> widely used since you'll be browsing an enourmous resource (the web).
> However, they don't give the same advantage with local file browsing,
> where you're not likely to have as many locations you browse.
>
> Even though multiple tabs are not immediately thrown in the users face
> they are still gonna be there in various aspects in the UI (especially
> once you start to add extra features to take advantage of tabs). And it
> means the total mental model of how the application works is
> significantly more complicated. The normal model of how to handle
> multiple views in the gnome desktop is really to use multiple windows
> (and the window manager is supposed to help you do this) and each time
> we deviate from this model we have to weight the advantages and the
> costs. In this case i don't think the advantages are great enough,
> especially considering that Nautilus goal isn't really to be a
> power-users filemanager, but rather an easy to use file manager for
> everyone.

Thanks for the explanation, and your points seem to make sense.
Particularly, I can confirm that I rarely have multiple nautilus windows
open.

However, I think that the tabs could be quite useful for the move/copy
operation:
- the user opens a tab with the source folder
- he opens another tab with the destination folder
- he drags the item from the tab with the source folder and drops it
on the tab with the destination folder
This way the user would not have to pay attention to place the
windows so that source and destination remain visible during the
complete operation.

But is this particular use case reason enough to abandon the model
of having one folder per window? I don't know.

By the way, in the current Nautilus the placement of the windows for the
drag and drop becomes even a bit more complicated because the source
window raises and potentially covers the destination area. This
behaviour already has a bug assigned to it:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=80984


>  > >especially when using
> >  >spatial mode (what does a tab even mean in that model?).
>  > Sorry; unfortunately I don't know what you mean by "spatial mode".
> >  Could you please explain to me what it means; I might then be able to
> >  understand you.
>
> Wow. You managed to miss the whole spatial vs navigational discussion? I
> guess it was a while since it happened.
>
> Here is the traditionally recommended first reading about spatial file
> management interfaces:
> http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/finder.ars
>
> I guess you use Ubunty, which has switched the default from spatial mode
> to browser mode. It can be toggled with the "Always open in browser
> window" setting in the behaviour tab.

Many thanks for the link: it gave me a first theoretical glance between
spacial and navigational mode.

Nevertheless, the multiple column view from the Finder in MacOSX is my
preferred way to use the filesystem. Maybe it has to do with my own way
to store things in a multilevel hierarchy of folders. Thanks to Trevor
Davenport, we are getting the multiple column view also in Nautilus...
:)

Ubunty? I suppose it is not a typo, but I don't think to have heard of
it before. A quick search on Google did not turn up anything really
useful for the moment; I probably have to dig further.

Have a nice day.

Francesco